Publishing books with LibreOffice, CreateSpace, and KDP

Customizing Images

To avoid copyright problems, add only your own graphics and photos. In general, other people's works are acceptable only when they're under Creative Commons licensing [5]. Be careful to abide by the conditions in naming the source and its reproduction rights under the same license (or that prohibit commercial use entirely).

If you want to create your own images or add content to existing ones, Libre/OpenOffice Draw provides a powerful option. For a smooth workflow, add an empty image frame with Draw in the Writer document that you can later populate while writing the document. The format of the file inserted in the Draw document doesn't matter, because the image will become embedded as an Office document in the manuscript later on. (See the Manual Page Breaks box for more.)

Using a separate Draw file for each manuscript has the advantage that all the illustrations for the book are in one place. You may also want to use parts of images in another book, which is easy to do in Draw. You'll also need additional graphic elements in the images such as text, arrows, and frames. Simply import the desired image in a Draw page and add the required elements. Figure 6 shows a Draw file with many images that later become figures in the document.

Figure 6: For meaningful illustrations, add arrows and text to images using Draw.

If the figure exists, choose all the elements on the sheet and copy it using Edit | Copy or Ctrl+C to the clipboard. Then, go to the manuscript file opened in Writer and add the figure to the desired location using Edit | Paste or the usual Ctrl+V keyboard combination.

If you choose Insert content… from the menu instead, Office lets you choose the data type. Content in the standard Draw 8 format can be edited directly in Writer. With Drawing format , Writer allows adding text labels only in layers. The vector information is maintained in a GDI Metafile so that the image scaling is lossless – which doesn't work with bitmap images – thereby avoiding problems with distorted content.

After inserting image content, you must still anchor the image and flow text around it. Right-click the image and select Anchor | To Paragraph . Then, Wrap | No Wrap ensures that the text does not wrap around the image, which is suitable only for smaller image formats. Next, choose Caption from the context menu and determine the image category (Figure 7). Each category numbering initializes to 1. If a category is missing, simply add its name. Then, enter the caption text in the upper field. The lower field indicates what the caption will look like.

Figure 7: For new images, add a caption and choose a category. Writer takes care of the rest.

Don't concern yourself with the image number; the captioning function adjusts it once you click OK to insert the caption. The image now has a frame around it with the caption. To add a cross-reference to the image in the text, the image number, page number, or caption can be used as selection elements.

Inserting Tables

You can embed tables in text as you would images. With Insert | Table or Ctrl+F12, you open the required dialog, where you enter the size and general information such as its name or a heading. You then set the anchoring and wrapping, again with Anchor | To Paragraph . Again, Wrap | No Wrap the preferred solution.

Format the table heading as Table Heading and the table content as Table Contents . Here the same rules apply: Maintain the paragraph styles as cleanly as possible, and you'll never need to change text passages after text passages when format or layout changes occur. As with images, you finally add a caption with its applicable numbering, being sure to select Table as the category.